Living With Chronic Pain – Spiritual Healing – Acquiring Wisdom
Happy New Year!
I’ve got an idea. Instead of hoping for things to get better, why not take the plunge and do something helpful about your lifestyle circumstances? If you wait for others to make your decisions for you, then aren’t you really living your life by reacting to their influence?
This way of living is void of wisdom – which brings me to my point about this blog. 2009 is a pivotal year for securing an improved life. In order to build a solid foundation and to reconstruct the way we do things, acquiring wisdom becomes mandatory for successful change.
So how do we acquire wisdom? I think we need to find out what wisdom is before we can really acquire it. Needless to say, I know first of all what wisdom isn’t. It’s not birthed from human intellect nor from behavioral scholarship nor from the higher spheres of philosophy; and related to the times in which we live, wisdom, in its fullness and completeness, contradicts our human perspective about relative truth.
In other words, wisdom cannot be limited by our interpretive beliefs about what we think might be best for our own lives. This is what relative truth does, supporting entitlement and encouraging self-actualization. While this postmodern approach seems to empower self-enhancement, oftentimes, relative truth falls short to secure moral efficiency among a collective society. Wisdom is much better. It not only creates personal magnificence, but also sustains all things for all people for the higher purposes of unity, regardless of obstacles or cultural differences.
So what is wisdom and how do we acquire it? Please open the ears to your heart for my answer.
Simply put, Jesus Christ is Wisdom, and not your ordinary understanding of wisdom. I’m referring to the Wisdom of God…something that is personal because of Jesus, and something that can dwell in you because of God’s grace, and something that will help you grow in the truest sense of richness.
Edmund Clowney, a professor of practical theology, writes, “We grow in wisdom as we prove out in our lives the things that are pleasing to God.” Expounding upon Clowney’s thought, this is what’s cool about wisdom. It’s not something that is stagnant nor something that is compiled encyclopedically as unattainable. We don’t get all the answers about life from one helping. Candidly speaking, wisdom is quite different because of how it delivers redemptive truth. It does so wrapped in love, and dispenses very patiently, step by step, one day at a time. In effect, wisdom does not force itself upon us nor does it pressure us to change into something we don’t want. Instead, it grows in the right situations, silently but surely, showing us victory instead of judgmental defeat.
Dig deep because wisdom is within our grasp, like a seed that has been planted in our hearts, ready to grow as Christ is formed within us. And when we dare to trust God, and then begin to walk in faith, His wisdom grows even more so. It’s this incomprehensible knowledge of God – which is made real and understandable through Jesus – that creates a strong and permanent foundation for living.
Keep me on your favorites. Please click onto www.gordonselley.com for more information about living with chronic pain, as well as spiritual healing.
Take a moment and challenge yourself about how you should live now. If you sincerely want to see the beauty of life literally sprout from adversity in 2009, then simply acquire wisdom.
